1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to appearance inspection apparatus, appearance inspection system, and appearance inspection appearance.
2. Background Art
As appearance inspection of various products such as various electric instruments or display apparatuses or various parts used for the products, visual inspection performed with eyes by an inspector and image inspection of taking an image of a product to be inspected and image-analyzing the data thereof have been performed. In the case of the visual inspection, miss of a defect can be caused. On the other hand, in the image inspection, there is insufficiency of consistency with visual appreciation of a human, and false detection of determining a non-defective product as a defective product can be caused. Therefore, the visual inspection and image inspection are often used together.
Conventionally, the both inspections are performed independently, and the inspections cannot be performed with referring the results of both the inspections to each other, and therefore, verification of the results of both the inspections is troublesome, and as a result the accuracy of the inspections is low.
In JP-A 2006-170622 (Kokai), there has been disclosed a technique of the appearance inspection apparatus in which an image-taking device is arranged in the vicinity of the position of eye of the inspector in the visual inspection and the image of the product to be inspected in the visual inspection is taken and the data can be saved.